New Canvas Features: March 2025 Updates
As part of our commitment to improving your teaching and learning experience, we’re excited to share new updates in Canvas, available as of January 18, 2025. These updates foster collaboration, simplify course management, and promote inclusivity. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the most impactful updates and their benefits.
What's New in Canvas Studio? A Refreshed Experience!
The new year brings exciting updates to Canvas Studio, making it easier and more powerful than ever for faculty to manage and share media content! With a fresh layout, smarter tools, and enhanced features, Studio has been designed to simplify your workflow and give you more time to focus on what matters most—engaging with your students and delivering dynamic learning experiences. Get ready to explore the latest innovations and see how they can transform your teaching in 2025!
Studio Now Has Automated Captioning!
Creating accessible content is an essential part of effective teaching in higher education. Canvas Studio now offers automatic captioning to make your media files more inclusive and user-friendly. This feature not only enhances accessibility for students with hearing impairments but also supports learning preferences for non-native speakers, visual learners, and others who benefit from captions.
Importing and Exporting Course Content
As part of our course archival process in Canvas, it’s important to ensure that all course materials are securely backed up and easily accessible for future reference. This guide will walk you through the steps to export and import Canvas courses, providing a reliable way to save your course content for subsequent use. Additionally, instructions are included to help you access your files and folders through Microsoft OneDrive using your FSCJ credentials.
Discussions Bug - Threaded Replies
A recent Canvas update caused some inconsistencies in discussion settings, where certain discussions may have had threading disabled unintentionally. If you created a discussion intending to allow threaded replies but found this option disabled, you can correct it by unchecking the "Disallow Threaded Replies" setting when editing your discussion.
What’s New in Canvas for the Fall 2024 Term?
Recent updates to Canvas include enhancements focused on usability and readability for FSCJ faculty. Key improvements include the option to disallow threaded replies in discussions, visual separators between discussion posts for better clarity, and a generative AI-powered discussion summarization tool. Additionally, the Smart Search feature enhances search functionality, while updates to SpeedGrader and the Gradebook improve grading efficiency with features like draft indicators for comments and streamlined messaging options.
Introducing the Canvas New User Tutorial: Enhanced Onboarding and Support
The EdTech team is excited to announce something new, informational, and even a little fun! We will be activating a New User Tutorial in Canvas, specifically tailored for our new users and those who may need tips for using various pages in Canvas. This new feature is part of our commitment to ensuring that you have the best possible experience and support as you navigate and utilize Canvas for your teaching needs.
Canvas Course Archival Plan Begins This Fall
As we approach the five-year mark of transitioning to Canvas, the Education Technology team would like to introduce the Canvas Course Archival Plan. This initiative will begin the process of streamlining course archives, ensuring that our digital learning environment remains both efficient and secure. The plan outlined below provides a clear timeline for the archiving and eventual deletion of courses, as well as what you should do to prepare for this project.
New Discussions Features in Canvas!
If you use discussions in your Canvas courses (and according to our recent data usage report, most of you are), then this post is one that you’ll want to read. Discussion improvements have consistently been an area where users provide feedback and want to see improvement in Canvas. Well, we agreed with you on and have been awaiting Canvas to improve for quite a few years.
….and that time has finally come!
